Crop materials, such as straw, hay or other forage are often baled for storage and transportation. It is then necessary to undo or break the bales apart in order to spread the crop materials for animal bedding or to dispense the crop materials as feed.
Over the years many different types of machines have been developed to undo or break apart bales of crop materials, this has become somewhat challenging with the advent of large rectangular or circular bales since these cannot be handled manually. Different types of machines are depicted in U.S. Pat. No. 3,979, 077 which issued to Dalman on Sep. 7, 1976; U.S. Pat. No. 4,448,361 which issued to Marcy on May 15, 1984; U.S. Pat. No. 4,449,672 which issued to Morlock et al on May 22, 1984; U.S. Pat. No. 4,524,916 which issued to Keyes et al on Jun. 25, 1985; U.S. Pat. No. 4,657,191 which issued to Dwyer et al on Apr. 14, 1987; U.S. Pat. No. 4,779,810 which issued Frey on Oct. 25, 1988; U.S. Pat. No. 5,255,867 which issued to Whittleton et al on Oct. 26, 1993; U.S. Pat. No. 5,340,040 which issued to Bussiere et al on Aug. 23, 1994; U.S. Pat. No. 5,601,241 which issued to Brewster on Feb. 11, 1997 and U.S. Pat. 5,738,87 which issued to Vandenberg on Apr. 14, 1998. All of these machines have been designed to undo, break apart or disintegrate bales of crop materials and can lay the loose materials down in a row as the machine is moving.
The machine typically comprises a container for receiving the bales, a disintegrator often in the form of a roller with cutters or flails for chopping or shredding the material from the bale, a mechanism to direct the bale to the disintegrator and a discharge slot such that the crop material is discharged from the bail processor to the ground forming a windrow as the machine moves forward.
Often, it is desirable to provide a combination of feed materials to the animals to provide them with a more nutritious and balanced diet as well as to make the feed more palatable to the animals. The feed mixture would normally include a crop (forage) material such as hay or straw together with a supplemental feed such as whole grain, chopped grain, corn, vitamin or other supplements, and high protein feed pellets or cakes.